Welcome to UserSpice 4.1 Alpha. Lots of documentation will be coming, but here's what we can tell you.
UserSpice 4.1 will be a pretty significant upgrade to UserSpice 4.0. Lots of things will be cleaned up. We have 50+ features to add. Just after release of 4.1, UserSpice will be forked into a regular and pro version. The regular version will be MUCH smaller than the current UserSpice 4 install. What's the tradeoff? It won't be designed for tinkerers. Basically once you're on 4.1 regular, you will only get security and bug fixes, but no new features until 4.2 (or 5.0) comes out. The pro users will get continuous new features as they roll out. Both will be FREE!
Hopefully we will be releasing new Alphas every week for the next few weeks. The plan is to make the changes to the database as late in the process as possible so your upgrades should be simple.
5/13/2016 – UserSpice 4.1 Alpha 4b – Note that the link below has been updated with a minor "b" update for a patch to fix the mailing feature. If you want to patch your Alpha 4 manually, just add this line below the require_once for validate.php
require_once $abs_us_root.$us_url_root.'users/classes/phpmailer/PHPMailerAutoload.php';
5/11/2016 – UserSpice 4.1 Alpha 4 – This is a MAJOR update. There is a lot going on under the hood to help deal with compatibility issues. Every server is configured differently and that's a royal pain when you're distributing a PHP application. Brian was hard at work tracking down issues in the forums and he did a ton of compatibility fixes. He painstakingly tested and debugged UserSpice in the following configurations. He went through the pain so you (and I) didn't have to. Major props.
IIS+PHP 5.6+Mysql 5.6 and up
WAMP 2.5
WAMP 3
nginx+PHP 7.0.4+Mysql 5.6 and up
XAMPP 5.6.20
MariaDB in place of Mysql in above scenarios
LAMP with Mysql 5.6
Overall, the code is cleaner and smaller. Yes. UserSpice 4.1 Alpha 4 is 2/3 smaller than Alpha 3 (and 4.0). How? We ditched Composer. No one in the forums was using it, so we got rid of the heft. We'll offer a standalone download to add it back if you want it, but now the entire package weighs in at a svelte 1.1mb down from 3.1. That's serious. The code itself is mean and lean and ready for you to test out. As always, please give us feedback and throw Brian a shout out in the forums.
4/29/2016 – UserSpice 4.1 Alpha 3 – This one took a while, but it was worth it. LOTS of changes to the core that bring efficiency. There are no longer 2 menus (one for users and another for userspice). LOTS of simplified URLS. Only one header now. There is a built in system to allow you to customize userspice files without losing your changes during upgrades (Hint: If you want to change a userspice file, just create a file with the same name in the usersc folder and UserSpice will automatically load that one instead. I'm expecting one more alpha. And then a beta. And then a live release. NOTE: Many many files have been moved to create alpha 3, so you will have duplicate files if you just dump this one on top of your old one. A fresh install is recommended.
4/11/2016 – UserSpice 4.1 Alpha 2 -Too many things to list individually. The big things are the bug and security fixes that were concurrently released in 4.0.0f and the ability to create your own custom/modded userspice pages without having our update system overwrite them (see this forum post). Lots of other tweaks. There was a bugfix to last week's banned user feature. Some bugs were fixed in the profile system. The gravatar has been switched to https to avoid mixed content error messages on https sites. Not a lot of major stuff, but it's coming along. The next big steps are simplifying the headers and menus to make them both easier to understand and to allow one menu to work on all parts of the site. Additionally, we're working on letting you add more folders that UserSpice can control. It's progress.
4/4/2016 – UserSpice 4.1 Alpha 1 -Although this is Alpha software, it feels really stable to me. Everything that worked on 4.0.0x seems to still work, plus you get all the new features. The ability to block users, lots of css and html improvements. UI improvements. It's all there and seems to be working. If you find bugs, please report them in the forums.